The President’s Speech
The grass was turning green but the trees were still without leaves.
The air temperature had risen above zero but on the shadier slopes and along the mountainsides around the village there was still snow, browny-grey with dust and soil. This far north, spring only crept up on winter slowly.
There was a murmur beneath the snow. Hardy plants were starting to send out shoots. Soon everything would blossom into a short, intense summer, bathed in light.
Throughout the winter, beautiful ice patterns had formed on the surface of the sea. The salty waves had frozen into little mountains of ice, waiting to be set free. In the night-time cold the ice in the fjord compacted, and in the spring sunshine it expanded. Rifts formed as the ice crazed and thin cracks spread at speed, making the ice tremble. The vibrations emitted a deep sound, a heavy rumble. It was the ice singing.
A procession of children made its way into the field in front of the sports hall. Their faces were hot and rosy-cheeked from marching through the village chanting and carrying flags. They had laid wreaths at the memorial stones raised for those from Salangen who had been lost at sea, and in memory of those fallen in the Second World War.
There were bands, there were choirs, there were dignitaries. Some families were dressed in sturdy traditional costumes from the deep valleys or narrow fjords of Norway, all with warm woollen underwear. Others were wearing the colourful kofte or long jerkin of the Sami people, complete with reindeer-skin moccasins and a knife in the belt. The pastor was in a full-length white robe with gold embroidered edging, while the Scottish head of the asylum seekers’ centre stood there in a purple tartan kilt and lace-up shoes, with a camera dangling round his neck and legs planted wide apart. The younger asylum seekers from Afghanistan clustered together in a group on their own, as did the Somalis and the Chechens. That year, the residents of Sjøvegan State Asylum Centre had carried their own banner in the procession. It was sky blue, with appliqué designs depicting the changing seasons, summer and winter, midnight sun and polar night, grass and snow, a silver fox and a leaping salmon. The whole thing was crowned with a Norwegian flag. Like the rest of the village, the asylum seekers were wearing the best clothes they had, and from the lectern a voice sang of ‘how good and beautiful Norway is’.
A listless gang dressed in red, looking rather the worse for wear, stood out from the rest in the square. Their heads were pounding. Their eyes were slits. There they huddled, some lying down, stifling yawns, a couple even asleep. Their red boiler suits were covered in dirt, seagull droppings and beer. These were the russ, the final-year students who were leaving Sjøvegan upper secondary school. Most of them had been up all night and many had been partying since the first day of May. They had danced and drunk, necked and vomited. Some had found a boyfriend or girlfriend, while others had lost theirs. Only the drivers had stayed sober. They had all taken it in turns to drive, one night each, in the clapped-out old vans that got even more scratched and dented as the russ season drew to a close.
Now the leavers were gathered with the rest of the town for the first time. Not yelling from open van windows as they screeched by, but assembled with the rest here on the sports field, where they had been running about not so many years ago, trying to wheedle ice creams and treating the russ like rock stars.
Now all they had to do was last out until the final item on the agenda: the russ president’s speech.
They pulled their red caps over their ears; the alcohol was breaking down in their bodies and they were freezing. They all had their names on the peaks of their caps, names to live up to or be ashamed of, given to them by the name committee at the start of the festivities. Their nicknames didn’t feel quite so funny now, among that crowd of solid fellow citizens, where the speeches and poetry readings inevitably conjured up a ceremonial mood. Baptism was the worst bit of the russ season. What power they suddenly wielded, those teenagers in the name committee, when they sat in judgement on their fellow students. It showed what a fine line there can be between teasing and bullying. A few drops of seawater on your forehead and the verdict was delivered right there on the pebbly shore, in white letters on the shiny black peak of your cap, some of them so rude you couldn’t show your cap at home. After the baptism one boy was left sitting on the beach, saying he would throw himself into the sea, in despair at being given the name Hole-in-One – a reference to an abortive sexual encounter in a red VW Golf that the whole school knew about. It was the russ president who decided the name had to go. He scraped the lettering off the peak with a blunt stone, took the soaking wet boy and his cap home to Heiaveien in the middle of the night, found some paint and began writing a new name with an unsteady hand. The name was to be Einstein. He started with the E, but then had an even better idea. E = mc2 was just right for a brainy type.
The name committee was furious; this was blatant abuse of power on the part of the president. Baptism was their business. But they let the boy keep his cap with Einstein’s formula on the peak.
Simon had been the obvious choice when the russ came to choose their president; most people were surprised that anybody else even bothered to stand against him, doomed to defeat as they must be. Simon won, naturally, while the runner-up was put in charge of the russ revue.
So there he was now, that Simon, looking pale with dark rings under his eyes, waiting for the neatly turned out boy from the lower secondary school to finish his poem. His own hair was stiff with gel beneath his red cap and his fingers felt numb.
Down in the crowd Tone, Gunnar and Håvard were waiting. Simon’s parents had been far from happy when he came home the previous autumn and told them he’s been elected president. ‘There goes his russ season,’ they sighed. For they knew that Simon got so involved in everything, in joys and sorrows, his own and others’, and as president he was bound to get drawn into disputes, caught between a rock and a hard place, between the school management and the demanding russ. The bitterest clash of all was over something as minor as a hundred kroner.
The russ had worked and collected money to donate to the paediatric department at Tromsø’s University Hospital. There turned out to be some money left over, amounting to a hundred kroner per russ, and the committee proposed that everyone would receive it in the form of a discount on the cost of the coach they were taking to a party in the neigbouring village of Finnsnes. Simon thought that was wrong, and that the money should rather go to the school’s project in Cambodia, where they were helping to sponsor a clean-water project for poor rural communities. ‘We earned it’ clashed with ‘Cambodia needs it more’. Positions that would later harden into political divisions created factions and cliques. Nobody was prepared to give in.
In the end, Simon got his way. As he usually did.
But now it was nearly over. It was his turn at the microphone.
His hoarse voice rang out across the square.
‘We have been celebrating the completion of our years of study, something that has required hard work day and night!’
Rousing cheers from the russ.
‘We are, if not reborn, then at least re-baptised over here at Brandy Bend,’ he bellowed to renewed howls.